Thriller: Horror: Spirit Doll (Mystery Suspense Thrillers) (Haunted Paranormal Short Story)

by Stephen Kingston

  “OK. I’m not throwing it away. I’ll give it to my sister, Heather. I think Jamie might want it,” Brad said.

  “No, we can’t give that thing to someone else. It’s not safe for anyone—especially our seven year old niece!’

  “Well, I spent too much money to just throw it away over your silliness. I can’t force you to keep this thing in our home, but you can’t force me to throw it away either.”

  “Won’t Chrissy be jealous when she finds out that we gave her doll to her cousin?”

  “Well, probably. We will have to cross that bridge when we come to it. That’s my decision on this. I bought the doll; it was my idea. I’ll decide what I do with it. Discussion over.”

  With that Brad walked out of the room.

  Lilly sat there on the bed feeling a bit disgusted and shocked. Brad had never been this unreasonable before. He was cold and distant, as if her feelings didn’t really matter. The doll was affecting him too.

  At least they would be rid of it soon.

  Heather Benson thought the doll was beautiful.

  She closed the door behind her as she watched her little princess Jamie snuggling with the doll in her little bed. The whole scene was utterly adorable. Jamie had fallen in love with it the second she had laid eyes on it and it had not left her grasp since then. She had never seen her daughter go so crazy over a doll before.

  When her brother Brad had called her up late that evening and asked her for this ridiculous favor she had been taken aback a bit. It was about nine at night and she and her husband Joe were getting ready to settle in to watch a few of their favorite shows after putting Jamie to bed when he had called.

  He had told her that Chrissy was becoming too possessive with the doll and that she played with it too rough and that they were worried she was going to break it. Heather didn’t really see what the big deal was; it was just a stupid doll. Kids broke toys all the time. But then Brad told her exactly how much money he had paid for the doll and where he had gotten it. So it wasn’t exactly a doll you picked up at Toys R Us. Apparently this particular doll was only made in Thailand and it cost a few paychecks. Heather thought that was absurd to pay that much for, what was essentially, a child’s toy and then take it away from the child because they were too young to appreciate it and take care of it properly, but she was not going to judge.

  As soon as she had laid eyes on the doll she understood exactly why he had not wanted anything to happen to it. She had never seen a doll in her life that was so realistic looking. It was beautiful. It looked exactly like Brad’s daughter, Chrissy. The resemblance was uncanny. She had wondered if Jamie was getting a bit too old for dolls, but she had beamed at the mere sight of it.

  Heather had thanked Brad and he left after they chit chatted a bit about his new job and all that was new with him. They agreed that they needed to have everybody over for a cook out soon. She rarely got to see her brother as much as she wanted to anymore. Ever since he had got that promotion he had been gone constantly and when he was back he was working constantly at the office and even going in on weekends sometimes. It was really sad.

  But in the interim, she and her sister in law Lilly had started to become closer. They had spoken on the phone a lot more and they had hung out a bit on occasion. Their daughters were not that close in age, but Jamie always felt like a big sister to Chrissy and they played together when she and Lilly came over to the house. It was sweet.

  Heather went to the living room where Joe was finishing off a glass of wine. He quickly poured her a glass and she sat down on the couch. They were getting ready to watch the new episode of Criminal Minds; her favorite. The wine tasted sweet and smooth.

  She hadn’t realized it until just then but as she sat down the dreaded sleep monster began to appear before her eyes. She had been up since four that morning and it had been a very long day. Heather was an architect and she had a huge presentation that was due. She had been working on the designs and the presentation for a few weeks and she was so glad it was done. But she was nervous as hell over it.

  Heather had woken up at four and gone for a jog in the dark before having a heathy breakfast and heading out to the office. She arrived at seven a.m. Getting there early let her finish setting everything up for the presentation and she was able to finalize a few of the drawings and the plans that she had been working so diligently on.

  The day had gone smoothly after that but she had other projects that she was responsible for updates on and a few more meetings. It was one of the busiest days that she could remember. Now it was over and she could relax a bit. Although she didn’t see herself making it past the first half of the episode before falling to sleep.

  She routinely did this and her husband would often wake her up and try to get her to bed, but more often than not she would wake up in the dark and realize it was almost time to get up anyway. Joe used to carry her to bed when that happened, but that was before he hurt his lower back in a skiing accident. He had ignored the doctor’s orders and tried to carry her once, which he had deeply regretted.

  “So, what was up with the doll? What was the urgency that we had to take it tonight?”

  “I’m not sure. My brother’s been acting a bit weird lately,” Heather said.

  “He is always acting weird,” Joe teased.

  “Hey, should we start talking about your family? You want to go there?”

  “No, please. I’m sorry,” Joe said.

  “Apparently he got the doll in Thailand when he was on his last trip and Chrissy was having some issues with it and they just don’t think she is old enough for it.”

  “For a doll?”

  “Did you see the doll? My brother paid like two grand for it,” Heather said.

  “Whoa! For a stinking doll?”

  “Yeah. I know, it’s a little extravagant.”

  “That is not the word I would use to describe it. I would use the word nutso,” Joe replied. Two thousand dollars for a damn piece of painted plastic? Joe would have kicked his own ass a bunch of times if he did something that stupid. He loved his daughter but she wasn’t getting a two thousand dollar piece of plastic with stuffing.

  “Well, Jamie loves it and we got it for free!”

  “I can’t believe he just gave it away. He could have sold it and gotten at least some money back,” Joe said.

  “Well, that’s my brother. He hates to sell things like that because deep down he feels that he messed up and made an impulsive, bad purchase. He can’t handle that. So this way it is still a gift.”

  “Like I said—your brother is nutso.”

  Heather slapped him playfully.

  Joe played the recorded show and the DVR came to life. The episode started off with some random people who were about to have some randomly awful thing happen to them. They had to have victims for the show, right?

  As Heather drifted off to sleep she thought she could hear Jamie upstairs giggling and talking with the doll. She could have sworn she heard two voices, but it was probably the TV…

  Joe stumbled down the stairs in a partial alcohol-induced stupor, clinging to the rail to avoid a nasty scene. He had polished off the most of two bottles of red wine and had been feeling fine when he had decided to hit the sack. He did have work tomorrow and if he wanted to be functional at his job at all, the old boy was going to have to get some damn sleep.

  He tried to wake his wife, but it became very evident that there was no way in hell she was moving from that couch any time soon. So giving up on that he had dawdled his way up the stairs to bed, where he had crashed out as soon as his head hit the pillow. He didn’t even remember stripping down to his skivvies. He had slept in his clothes more times than he could count after a night of too much wine.

  But now he had been awoken by nature calling. After relieving himself in the bathroom he thought he would go downstairs and see if his wife was willing to make the trek up to the bedroom. The clock on the night stand said it was about a quarter till four, so hopefully
they both could get a few more hours of sleep before they had to be responsible adults and head off to work.

  Ugh, work. The idea filled him with dread already. It was Wednesday, so that meant he had three more days of this stupid week, counting today. That was depressing enough to make him want to polish off another bottle of wine before he went off to the office.

  He didn’t dislike the job inordinately, but if you do anything long enough it starts to wear on you and bore you to tears. Eventually just the thought of it makes you want to scream. Of course the insurance game had never really been known for its excitement, even as a salesman. He was pretty good at what he did and for a while it had filled him with a sense of pride, but that had been pretty lackluster the past couple of years and he felt like he needed a change.

  Heather was all for him making a career change to something else that made him happy, but he had no idea what that something else was. She would support whatever he eventually decided though. That was one of the reasons he loved her so much; and she was also the only normal one in her family. Even she would admit that after some prodding.

  What was up with her brother and that doll? That whole thing had seemed bizarre to him. Heather knew it was bizarre and she had to defend her brother, but it was damn weird.

  As he entered the living room, he could see his wife still sleeping soundly on the couch. He walked over and watched her for a moment, enjoying her sexy silhouette glistening in the silver light from the big moon that was shining through the window. She looked so beautiful. He wanted to wake her up, but decided against it; she was just looking far too peaceful. He had to let her rest.

  But he was thirsty as hell. He went into the kitchen and poured himself a glass of water from the drinking water in the fridge. It tasted fresh and smooth. He hated that they had to buy drinking water from the store because no one in their right mind would drink the stuff that came out of the tap unless they wanted to develop a third eyeball. It was full of who could say how many stinking pollutants from all of the nearby chemical plants. It was beyond sickening when you really thought about it.

  He hoped that he was able to get back to sleep when he went back up. Sometimes when he woke up he was up and there was no going back to bed, but then he would crash halfway through the morning at work and he would be dragging tired the rest of the day.

  The giggling came from downstairs.

  He stopped moving instantly and strained his ears trying to pick up again on what he had just heard. The silence screamed in his ears and any noise at all was suddenly amplified. He could hear his heart beating in his ears, his breathing sounded like a freight train, and even his wife’s faint breathing in the other room sounded as loud as the air conditioning.

  He held his breath and concentrated harder. What had he just heard? Had he actually heard anything or was it just his imagination? Maybe he was still half asleep and had not heard what he thought he had. Or maybe he was just going plain nuts and this was the first sign—hearing laughter in the dark at four in the morning.

  The giggling came again. It sounded like the laughter of a little girl and it appeared to be coming from the basement.

  Jamie. What in the hell was his daughter doing up this late? And why was she in the basement? Probably watching TV in his man cave, which he told her, was off limits.

  After a couple of years of marriage Joe had finally realized his own dream of turning the basement into a kick ass man cave. He had a huge television set, a mini bar, foosball, a big pool table, and he had several video game controller chairs. It was awesome. Heather had been such a sport about letting him take over the basement to do this that he could never properly thank her. It was a pretty sweet arrangement actually.

  He would often hang out there on weekends when she was out running errands or when he had the guys over to watch some sporting events or to just hang out and get drunk. He and Heather, at least once a month, had a mini gathering of friends over where he and his boys would hang out down there while all the wives hung out upstairs. It was a sweet arrangement. Eventually his fellas would stagger upstairs after consuming twenty beers each and the wives would drive their half comatose husbands home.

  But he had forbidden Jamie to go down there by herself. He could see her damaging something while playing. He was probably overreacting but his man cave was his and he desperately wanted it to stay his.

  He opened the door and was tempted to call down after her, but he didn’t want to wake Heather. He turned on the light and headed down expecting Jamie to be hanging out on his plush leather sectional couch, but when he got to the bottom of the stairs there was no one there.

  The room was empty. He saw no evidence of anyone, but she had to be down there somewhere. He had heard her plain as day.

  She was probably in the bathroom messing around.

  Joe opened the bathroom door, but found nothing.

  The giggling was behind him.

  What in the hell was going on here? Joe walked across the room to the mini bar and peered behind there, but saw nothing. What in the world was his daughter playing at? This was really starting to annoy him. She had no business being down here and she had no business being awake at four in the morning. What in the hell was going on?

  Joe thought he heard the giggling on the stairwell. That was impossible. He had just come through there and she couldn’t have gotten past him to go up there. He was starting to think that his daughter was actually messing with him. She had to know he was down there and now she was playing games with him. She was going to be in big trouble when he found her, that was for sure.

  It was too late for this—

  His leg jerked out from under him and he felt his whole bodyweight falling forward. He instinctively tried to catch himself, but it happened too fast. His face caught the brunt of the force as he smacked into the floor, smashing his nose. The numbness washed over his face as the blood began to spew.

  Stunned, he rolled over and grabbed at his face trying to inspect the damage. The blood seemed to be coming from a cut on the bridge of his nose. It hurt like hell, even through the tingling numbness. The second that his nose smashed against the floor he felt his entire face go numb.

  He no sooner realized what happened to his nose than he saw what had tripped him. He wished he had not seen anything. He wished he had not come downstairs to investigate the odd noise. He wished more than anything right then that he was safe and sound in his bed sleeping like a baby. But he was there and he had to deal with what he was seeing, even though it spat in the face of everything that he had ever believed in his entire life.

  There was the doll. It was standing by itself right in front of him and it was walking towards him with a crazed expression on its face. Its face was twisted and contorted, far from the angelic face that was painted on it. This doll had a red glow in its eyes and what appeared to be blood oozing out of its mouth. The skin was now gray and ghastly looking as if it was an animated corpse.

  He wanted to shut his eyes and block it all out. That was all he had to do. He just had to shut his eyes and block it all out because it was not real. It was all just a stupid dream and he was going to wake up in bed any second now. He repeated this mantra over and over in his mind, but it was just not happening.

  The doll was still there and it was coming towards him. It was giggling that same sweet giggle he had heard upstairs, the one that had lured him into this trap with this demonic thing. But the giggling was changing. It was starting to sound evil and toxic until it no longer resembled a human’s voice at all.

  Something shiny caught his eye just then. He had not seen that the doll was holding a large butcher knife in its hand. It was tapping the sharp blade against its palm as it stalked slowly towards him.

  “No… don’t...” He felt his voice began to beg, the sound of it scared him shitless. He wanted to scream for help, but his vocal chords were paralyzed. His body began to lurch away from this unholy beast as it came closer and closer.

  Somehow
Joe forced his legs to remember their primary function and he began to stagger to his feet. He had it planned in his mind that he would roll over the back of the couch and run past this damn thing and up the stairs. It was his only hope.

  The second he was on his feet he started to jump across the couch, but the doll was on him in a flash stabbing him in the chest in rapid fire motion, its blade wielding arm like a machine gun putting jagged hole upon jagged hole in his chest.

  The pain was excruciating and no matter how hard he willed his body to jerk this thing off of him, the doll might as well have weighed two hundred pounds because it did not move.

  His body collapsed to the floor as the doll continued to stab him to death. He could feel his body growing cold underneath the onslaught of the pain and he wondered what he had done to deserve this and what was going to happen to his family. Were they all going to die too?

  Was the doll going to butcher them just as it had him?

  He tried to scream to warn them, but the blood in his throat blocked any sound from escaping. The world began to spin around him as a blanket of darkness intruded upon his vision. In front of the darkness was nothing but a blurry snapshot of the reality that he had once known.

  He could not believe that his end was inevitable and that it was going to happen this way. It was not right. There had to be something else waiting for him.

  The darkness engulfed him and he knew no more.

  Chapter Five

  Brad pulled the car into the driveway and shut off the engine. The silence of the cab was overwhelming and he wanted nothing more than to get out of his clothes, but still he sat there waiting for someone to make a move. He looked around the cab of the car at the glum faces of his wife and child. They were so shaken up that his heart ached to be able to bring them a little bit of comfort and joy in some small way, but he had no idea how to do it.

  The funeral had been a nice service, and he would never be able to remove its imprint from his mind. He guessed that was the point, but this time it was different. He had never been to a double funeral before. It was twice as hard to deal with, twice as sad, and twice as tragic.